The management of computer networks has grown in complexity as networks have become larger and more advanced. New features offered by the networks require new features in the management software. As such, delivering a streamlined and effective network management product to businesses has become a goal of many software designers.
As network management applications have been developed for many years, there are a number of applications with complex code. This is due to the fact that typically programmers will add additional code when new features are added, but will not remove outdated or redundant code, either by choice or by simply not being able to locate all of the portions to be removed. This can all be traced to many companies' lack of a true development process and lack of adequate documentation regarding the created code.
This condition ultimately requires a steeper and longer learning curve for new developers to develop new features: as the code becomes more and more complex, it becomes harder and harder for developers to add additional features, and those additional features add more complexity to the code, making it even hard for developers to add newer features, and so on. This also puts a business at risk due to knowledge and design not being documented.
As such, programmers are often unable to meet shorted product cycles for new network management applications due to product requirement changes. For example, the label of a user interface may change, or new user interface fields in the application may need to be added. These changes are even more significant and complex if the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) management information base (MIB) definitions are changed, which results in more work for modifications, backward compatibility issues, etc. Furthermore, once all this is changed, a Quality Assurance (QA) and documentation team must also reperform all testing and update the user manuals, all of which ultimately delays product delivery.
Furthermore, past solutions have been plagued by an inefficient network management software development process. Whenever a new product feature is required, a new graphical user interface (GUI) or Java applet may be developed, although the underlying workflow has not changed (getting user settings from the GUI, binding them to the SNMP MIB variables, and deploying the settings to the target devices). This leads to laborious programming, error-prone and repetitive work, code duplication, etc. The more code that is written, the more that bugs will be encountered. This includes time consuming software debugging and maintenance, as well as support costs. The past development process fails to identify the commonalities underlying network management software applications.
What is needed is a way to be able to massively produce network management software applications without laborious programming.
Furthermore, what is needed is a solution that allows network administrators to customize network management applications to meet their own needs. There currently is no widely-known way for a network administrator to change the network management application's user interface to allow him to add/delete/update the user interface to the network administrator's own liking, or to manage new devices that are not native to the network management application. If a customer has a new request, they must ask the application vendor to develop a customized solution just for the one customer, which may not be needed by other customers. This adds costs to the network management application that other customers must bear.